Jamie serves school dinners in castle grounds
A live cow, a man dressed as a potato and the British army serving hot meals to a hundred primary school children signalled the latest phase in Jamie Oliver’s schools campaign today.
The chef, midway through filming the second series of Channel Four’s pioneering Jamie’s School Dinners, appeared in the grounds of Lincoln Castle as part of his mission to improve the health of the UK’s school pupils.
He gave a passionate speech preaching the virtues of hot, home-cooked food while piling youngsters' plates up with the best spaghetti bolognese and salad a school budget can buy.
Millions tuned in to see Oliver wage war on the dreaded turkey twizzler during the first series of Jamie’s School Dinners, a campaign that last year saw the British government hand over an extra £220m (€320.7m) for school meals.
Hot on the heels of his political success, Bafta winning Oliver and his trusty sidekick, Greenwich dinnerlady Nora, set their sights on rural Lincolnshire, where out of 286 primary schools, only three have a kitchen to supply hot meals to pupils.
“A year ago we got £220m (€320.7m) out of the British government to help improve school meals.
"The result is that each school gets £1,200 (€1,700) plus 50p (70c) a kid,” Oliver said today.
“A year later I thought it was my duty to make another programme to see what has happened, what we have achieved and what we haven’t achieved, and the result is that I found Lincolnshire.”
Oliver said his horror at discovering that so many under-11’s in Lincolnshire, and 11 other counties, were surviving on packed lunches led him to focus his attention on the demise of the school kitchen and to think of a way round it.
“I looked at that £1,200 (€1,700) and thought: 'What on earth is a Lincolnshire school going to do with it?' because £1,200 is not going to make much of a change,” he said.
With the government promising to further increase spending on school meals over the next 10 years – Lincolnshire is scheduled for a boost in 2008 - Oliver, Nora and the county council set about tackling the problem their own way, using the £1,200, plus 50p (70c) per child, to solve the problem.
And the solution is simple, he claims, as he introduces a teacher, a pub chef and a farmer to the 2,000-strong crowd.
Now in two rural schools, where the second series of the hit show has been filmed, local hotels and restaurants are being paid to supply hot, healthy foods, transported in a hotbox bought with the government cash.
Pub chefs are being trained by a council nutritionist and local farmers are supplying cheap, fresh produce.
“£1,200 (€1,700) plus 50p (70c) a kid can’t buy kitchens, so today is a plan B,” the Essex-born father-of-two declared.
“It’s not rocket science,” he added.
